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Republican honor is on the line. The honor, such as it is, of a political party always depends on the character of the candidates it nominates. Donald Trump is an ASS. Everyone with the slightest sensibility knows that. Well, more accurately, he is a certifiable Narcissistic Sociopath, unfit for any pubic responsibility, no less that of the presidency.[1]

“According to DSM-5, individuals with NPD have most (at least five) or all of the symptoms listed below (generally without commensurate qualities or accomplishments).

Trump’s business practices have long demonstrated his complete lack of a moral center. As an investigative reporter, David Kay Johnson covered Trump for nearly thirty years and has documented his biographical trail of nefarious business practices.[2] By pandering to the worst bigoted impulses of the so-called “Republican base,” he skillfully captured the presidential nomination. Because of his dexterity at manipulating the fears and incipient hatreds of socially and economically displaced white Americans, some consider him the most skilled politician on the national scene today. That is a problem for the Republican Party.

Pseudo-patriotic Perversity

One of the key characteristics of a sociopath is complete lack of empathy for other human beings. At the Democratic National Convention, Mr. Khizr Khan righteously scolded Donald Trump’s racist tropes denigrating Khan’s warrior son, whose heroism sacrificed his own life in defense of his comrades in arms. Khan’s articulate speech was eloquent in its passion and pain, something of an order entirely beyond the grasp of the Billionaire Bimbo, whose only experience with the military was to avoid service.

Trump’s reaction, as expected, expressed not a scintilla of empathy for a hero’s sacrifice or his parents’ pain. He has no sense whatsoever of the deep sacrifices that our troops have made in the wars of choice prosecuted by the U.S. Corporate State. Trump’s reaction to Mr. Khan’s eloquent critique of the perverse Republican candidate’s insults was to attack Mrs. Ghazala Khan for her silence as she stood with her husband. He projected onto Mrs. Khan more of Trump’s Tropes of ethnic derision. Fortunately, Mrs. Khan later spoke strongly and shot back a statement that she had been too upset to speak at the Democratic convention. How dare he attempt to trivialize this gold-star mother’s pain with his ethnic slurs?

Wrong War, Right Heroes

While many would consider it old news by now, the disrespect Trump showed to America’s fallen warriors and their families remains somewhere on the far side of disgusting. It is entirely consistent with the numerous tropes of Trump’s tragic pandering to the lowest hateful impulses of American political culture. Despite my opposition to such wars of choice, the cavalier treatment of our troops outrages me, including the common disrespect shown troops who may be Muslim, gay, transgender, or whatever.

These are gallant victims of unnecessary wars. Regardless of the legitimacy of the wars, these heroes stood tall and performed as the warriors they were. Many died; others suffered severe trauma, both physical and mental. Trump’s self-indulgent juvenile whining is just beyond tolerance. His self-aggrandizing B.S. should offend every American, whatever her/his political position on anything.

One of my biggest worries is why such a narcissistic sociopath could possibly garner enough support from voters to become a candidate at all, no less mount a serious campaign in a general election for president. However, the machine of electoral politics knows no moral compass. At the same time, too many Americans respond to the hateful rhetoric of jingoistic xenophobia that is encouraged by the propaganda of the war profiteers. Where is the Republican honor in all this? AWOL ~ Absent With Out Leave.

I remember the days when I strongly protested the U.S. war on Viet Nam. Having already served in the military, I knew something about how the system works and how enlisted men, are treated and required to perform. The military must serve the purposes of the politicians, who, in all instances since World War II, have not had the guts to declare the wars they prosecute.

The role of the airman, marine, soldier, or sailor can be easy or hard, boring or terrifying. But it is always subordinate to the formal commands and personal whims of one’s commanders and their political ambitions. This I was able to observe without ever having seen combat. War fighters often know little of the geo-politics of warfare; their loyalty and performance has more to do with commitments to their brothers in arms. In that, they excel.

Psychopathology of Pretenders to Authority

In the opposition to the Viet Nam war, too many protesters projected their anger upon the troops. Draftees and recruits were victims of the military adventurism of the politicians of both parties, who formulated the terrible policies that killed so many. Elites in this world prosecute wars; the troop are usually victims as well as directed killers. Elites always find plenty of scapegoats onto whom to project all the evil they create. Without a scintilla of military experience, Donald Trump is a master of denial and projection in his war against everyone.

The misogynist megalomaniacal charlatan, who pretends to be prepared to take on the mantle of Commander in Chief (!), better fits the cloak of Traitor (need I mention his affinity for Putin?). His only defense would be mental illness – the insanity he daily displays – but that would be terribly difficult for a narcissist sociopath to admit. He has no legitimate standing in either business (where he is a cheat), politics (a fraud), economics (multiple bankruptcy as business model), or patriotism (a pure demagogue). Anyone who thinks otherwise is just watching too much of the Fox ideologues who trash anyone who actually thinks of issues rather than jerk their knees in response to the xenophobic demonizations so fully infused into Trump’s Tropes.

Party loyalty is a difficult matter. Real conservatives find themselves in a difficult position, put there by the Republican Party failure to manage its own nomination process. (The Democratic Party managed their nomination process by making it anti-democratic to protect the party elite from a popular candidate.) Trump’s demagoguery pandered to the resentments of the Tea-Party base of the Republican Party, a shrewd tactic to capture the nomination. The party elite could muster no viable response. The corporate interests, who support both Republican and Democratic politicians who toe the corporate line, just did not know what to do with the unpredictable neo-fascist.

Real conservatives will have nothing to do with this perverse pretender to political authority. Honorable Republicans, whatever we may think of their position on issues, have refused to participate in the fiasco that may yet result in the end of the Republican Party.

_________

[1] Just check the Psychology Today website for some professional diagnoses. Psychologists are normally reticent about making comments on the mental conditions of public figures. However, in the case of Trump, some seem willing to make an exception. Diagnoses from afar may be problematic, but in this case the symptoms are as public as the person.

[2] David Kay Johnson, The Making of Donald Trump (Brooklyn, New York: Melville House Books, 2016).

COP21, like the United Nations climate conferences before it, appears to be floundering over international non-binding showcase “commitments” to reduce carbon emissions — and is emitting effusive illusions of progress. Pleas of island nations fall on deaf ears. The negotiators are ignoring the scientific evidence that the reductions they are talking about fall far short of what is necessary to keep the planet habitable in the coming decades.

Meanwhile, a new set of players or “stakeholders” has appeared on the scene. Bill Gates, one of the richest men in the world, retired from his position as CEO and creator of Microsoft, is now overseeing one of the biggest philanthropic foundations in the world, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He is forming a group of 28 leading world investors called the “Breakthrough Energy Initiative.” This group of investors is aligning with governments in a new public-private venture called “Mission Innovation.”

Gates has pulled together billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), George Soros (consummate currency trader), Jack Ma (Alibaba), and Saudi Prince Alaweed bin Talal, in a massive effort at venture philanthropy. With their government allies, these guys are taking the powers that be directly down the wrong road. Their goal is to invest in Research and Development (R&D) of new low or no-carbon energy production technologies over the next five years. Their billions of private and public dollars could be much better spent on direct climate mitigation efforts urgently needed now.

First, we don’t have time to bet on the optimism of wealthy technophiles. No, not all problems in the world can be solved by some new (likely energy-intensive) technology. The Climate Crisis is NOW. We must apply all possible existing scientific and material resources to reduce carbon emissions in the present, rather than betting on yet to be proven technologies that may be invented and developed in a few years.

Second, all new technology, especially the high tech stuff almost universally favored by venture capitalists, is energy intensive in both its development and its deployment. We need just the opposite: low-tech or existing technologies. Neither existing solar nor wind technologies need new R&D investments to be deployed now.

Third, we must transform the profligate endless-growth high consumption and waste economy that produces most of the carbon emissions currently destroying climate stability. Otherwise, emissions cannot be curtailed enough to avert disaster. That involves things we already know how to do, such as insulation, various other energy saving actions, and reductions in the explosive international trade that consumes so much fossil-fuel generated energy.

Neither the Gates Group of Billionaires nor the faux negotiators of COP21 seem willing to face the hard problem of immediate massive reductions in carbon emissions. What humanity and the planet need is a complete transformation of the global growth-at-any-cost economy into an ecological economy grounded in the earth systems that have sustained us all — so far.

What we need most is “Local Community Resilience to Avoid Climate Catastrophe,” which is the title of my article just published in the Green Fire Times, the largest distribution newspaper in Northern New Mexico. GFT focuses on all things related to sustainable life in the Southwest. In that article, I discuss resistance, replacement, and resilience, as the “three R’s” of survival under the conditions we face. These ideas are also discussed in some previous posts on this site. Civil society movements demonstrating outside the Paris conference — and around the world — are growing, as they did in response to previous establishment climate conferences that accomplished next to nothing. But they must grow much faster. The building of a global movement to achieve the Next Great Transformation offers the best hope, if it can happen fast enough.

The Industrial Era has provided prosperity for many in the nations that industrialized first. In many ways it has also involved the plunder and pollution of both Body and Planet for over 200 years. After beginning to improve material existence for industrialized nations, especially through the 1950s and 1960s, the broadening participation in prosperity began to fade. The widely praised success of the industrialized nations of the North was achieved on the backs and at the expense of the non-industrialized peoples of the South.

Colonialism and later imperialism were essentially a massive transfer of materials for industrial production just as slavery was a forced transfer of human labor for agricultural production. The result was prosperity in Europe and North America and poverty nearly everywhere else. At first, environmental degradation was mostly in the South except in Northern factory towns; now it is everywhere. The culmination of the Industrial Era is climate disruption and its converging catastrophes of social disintegration, poverty, starvation, and war – unless drastic actions are taken now.

The Worst of the Best
But prosperity had its costs for the people in the industrial North. It has increasingly distorted human life by marketing more and more meaningless products while wages decline and jobs are lost. Capital is mobile; labor is not. NFTA, TPP, and other international trade agreements betray citizens and national sovereignty in favor of unfettered international capital movement. The worst of prosperity for the growing numbers who are excluded is that the poverty and pollution caused by extractive industry and international trade fall disproportionately on them. The worst of pollution is that the politics of extractive industrial technology have allowed increasingly toxic materials invade living systems everywhere.

Any real democracy would have put on controls to protect the public interest. Our false democracy serves the corporate interest in immediate profit at the expense of the public interest in health and happiness. Exposure of the smallest microorganisms and the largest ecological earth systems to the myriad of chemicals in the waste of prosperity wreaks havoc on living systems. The diverse and ubiquitous forms of industrial and consumer waste never existed over millennia as living systems evolved. So they never had a chance to develop resistance to the toxic effects of unnatural waste. Biological evolution occurs at a pace vastly slower than the speed with which the industrial revolution has polluted the planet. Today’s unprecedented rate of species extinction is accelerating with no end in sight.[1] Humanity depends on the complex web of life for its survival. But our power elites are locked into a death dance of short-term and very short-sighted self-enrichment. [2]

Larger earth systems, mainly climate and the oceans, are key determinants of the stability and survival of species in local ecologies. In addition to widespread exposure to toxins, climate disruption has also caused major damage to local ecosystems as well as larger earth systems. The damage is seen in key components of these systems, such as acidification of the oceans and increasingly erratic storm patterns. These large earth systems play major complex roles in local ecological conditions over time, and have major impact on their stability. What recently appeared to some as a hiatus in global warming, measured as average atmospheric temperatures, was actually an artifact of the oceans absorbing much more carbon dioxide and heat than had been expected. This has caused unprecedented acidification of ocean waters, massively disrupting the food chain by causing many species of crustaceans to be unable to form their shells. Coral reefs are dying; clam and other populations are plummeting. Changes in ocean temperatures are having major effects on weather patterns such as El Nino and La Nina, which in turn cause more extreme weather in various locations.

Prisoners of Greed
The extreme danger of doing nothing or doing a little about global warming is increasingly obvious to most thinking humans who have access to basic climate-change information. But one factor in policy decisions that is rarely mentioned is the relative comparison of risk and reward for different lines of climate action and for different political interests. Power elites are ‘in the game’ but play out their personal (high salaries and obscene bonuses) and corporate (stock prices) short-term interests, without reference to the public interest or the interests of humanity.

“The Prisoners Dilemma,” is an exercise used by game theorists and behavioral researchers to better understand how human decisions are made in conditions of variable risks and imperfect information. It is a simple game. Each player has two choices. If player A chooses the potentially high-reward option, s/he can win all, but only if Player B chooses the moderate reward option. If both players choose the potentially high-reward option, both lose. However, if both players choose the moderate reward option, both players win moderate rewards. Ultimately, it is about greed and aggression vs. cooperation and moderation. In such simulations, the players usually learn over several iterations of the game that the moderate-reward win-win scenario works best for all. But learning takes time.

In the real world where situations are much more complex, the risks and rewards can vary widely. But despite claims of free-market fundamentalists, cooperation often performs far better for all involved than does greed. Our economy of ever-growing extractive capital and industrial and consumer waste has in recent years performed very well for those power elites who have chosen the potential high-reward option of greed. (The rest of us seem to have chosen the moderate reward option, and we are losing.) But just as in the Prisoners Dilemma, the continuation of the plunder capital model of success is ultimately unsustainable. Because these “corporate robots” are captives of the magical thinking of the Sacred Money and Markets” ideology, they are slow learners when it comes to cooperation and protecting the commons.

Games are abstract forms; they can be repeated endlessly by simply starting over regardless of the outcome. But the real world is not a game; it has real boundaries of time and environment. When we destroy earth systems, there is no do-over. Extinctions are forever. We cannot restart destroyed ecosystems; we can only try to save them before it is entirely too late. We cannot rewind the growth economy, nor can it go on much longer. All we can do is create a new economy that does not destroy the earth systems upon which we depend for survival. The old failing growth economy will die of its own failures or we will transform it into a living economy that supports both humans and the rest of life on this planet. We must choose quickly.

Choosing Life
Ever more concentrated wealth in the hands of the power elites ultimately will destroy their dominance. It is an open question whether their downfall will come at the hands of climate catastrophe or social rebellion, or both. The timing and success of cooperation overcoming greed will determine the degree of chaos avoided. We also wonder whether the necessary Great Transformation of the economy and society can happen before climate disruption leads to increased food insecurity, poverty, mass migration, water wars, and related catastrophes.[3] We must say yes, turn away from the international corporate growth economy, and shape resilient local community economies in harmony with the living Earth. No small task.

Life, of course, is much more complicated than the “Prisoners Dilemma” game. Yet, games can help us learn more about human behavior and decision making. Other social psychological patterns are also informative, such as the “free rider syndrome.” I liken the Wall Street financial elite, the President, and the Congress to a gang of subway riders who jump over the turnstile to get free rides at everyone else’s expense – only the consequences of their ‘free ride’ are far worse. They take vastly more and cost the rest of us vastly more, both on an immensely grander scale: that of the global economy. They destroy the system in order to continue plundering it.

These elite players routinely take the high-risk option in seeking the high reward – but they have already rigged the game. They ‘socialize’ the high risk (pass off the losses to the rest of society). They ‘privatize’ the high rewards (capture for themselves the phantom wealth generated by their financial and economic manipulations). They do all this through personal and corporate control of “the game” – but they don’t seem to understand that it is not a game; it is a life and death struggle for humanity. Just a few of their methods include:

• legislating tax reductions for the rich;
• preventing climate action, which would cut into their pollution-producing profits;
• eliminating legal controls on financial speculation, cutting government programs that are in the public’s and planet’s interest;
• keeping wars of choice going for huge arms industry and banking profits;
• reducing government control over international financial transactions, trade, and money laundering; and
• forcing through Congress international trade deals – such as NAFTA and TPP – that legalize corporate sovereignty over governments, preventing health, labor, and environmental regulations that might interfere with their profits.

In the short run, that high risk is borne by everyone else and the high rewards are theirs. We have to understand, many of the most powerful are clever sociopaths; that is how they got where they are. Others are merely highly paid skilled functionaries, supporting the system that rewards them and punishes deviance from corporate “values.” They can retire to their high-security estates and revel in their clever success, though many are unable to quit their quest for ever more power. But their greed is ultimately self-destructive in spite of their denial and their political power. They may even survive a little longer in their gated compounds than some less privileged. But nobody will escape a dying planet. We may all lose everything if their gamble fails, and it will. It is only the rest of us who can make a difference, if we will.[4]

The most important question is whether we will be able to do something about the coming collapse in time to avoid it. That is why to do anything less than take extreme actions to constrain climate chaos is suicidal. That is also why our situation is so difficult. To wait for the President, the Congress, or the financial and corporate elites to take drastic actions to transform the growth-at-any-cost economy to a sustainable living economy is both futile and suicidal too. Only by massive social mobilization can the power elites be brought under control and the economy transformed to align with the requirements of living on the Earth. Perhaps Pope Francis’ encyclical and his invitation to Naomi Klein to the Vatican conference on climate change portend a major shift toward the Sacred Life and Living Earth story. Yes, there are signs everywhere that the Great Transformation has begun. But we must hasten it.
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[1] Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich, Anthony D. Barnosky, Andrés García, and Todd M. Palmer, “Accelerated modern human-induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction,” Science Advances. Vol. 1 no. 5 (19 June 2015). http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/5/e1400253.full
[2] David Korten, Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2015) makes an important point: Because of the predominance of the culture of “Sacred Money and Markets” the power elites are not so much in control of the corporations (“money seeking robots”) that rule the economy. Rather, they are mere cogs in the leviathan of corporate plunder of the Earth’s living wealth. Control rests with the Story, which, as he argues, must be changed.
[3] Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (New York: Nation Books, 2011) takes us on a tour of numerous locations around the world where the “catastrophic convergence of poverty, violence, and climate disruption” is already fueling migrations, wars, and starvation amidst the devolution of failed states and collapsing economies unable to sustain growing populations whose “carbon footprints” are vastly smaller than those of the industrialized nations that have caused most of anthropomorphic global warming.
[4] Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014) chronicles both extractive capitalism’s disruption of the climate and the political failure of mainstream environmental organizations to institute effective climate action policy. Klein concludes that only a mass movement from below that transforms the social order can save the planet. David Korten (2015) offers a transformative framework for replacing the “Sacred Money and Markets” narrative that dominates the planet today, with a “Sacred Life and Living Earth” narrative capable of producing and sustaining a moral economy in the interests of humanity and the planet.

Learning is usually an exalted concept – in the abstract. But the practice of learning does not often measure up to the ideal. That is clear in the way we treat our schools. Social learning reflects the failures and deficits in personal learning. Power fears truth. Institutions perpetuate the prejudices and magical thinking of their members, who take their direction from the elites upon whom they depend. People too often believe what is convenient for protecting and maintaining their wealth, position, or other form of power. This is called ideology: language constructed to justify power.

Political and economic elites are able to promote their ideologies, which in turn are deployed to promote their political or economic power. The process is a closed positive feedback loop. That is why the public interest is so rarely represented in the actions of government institutions and corporations. It is also why we so often hear subjugated or exploited populations repeat the very propaganda that elites use to oppress them. What is the matter with Kansas? The Big Lie repeated over and over again, in the absence of contrary facts, is believed. Critical thinking is in short supply.

Police Racism Denied
Positive feedback loops between power and language reinforce power while excluding any language or meanings that might diminish power. “The rich get richer.” Any conflict that may threaten power is framed as a question of “us” versus “them.” The powerful are, ideologically, right by definition. Anyone who challenges the ideology of power is by definition wrong and a threat to “law and order,” or “public safety,” or “economic growth,” or “family values.” The public interest is not represented by elites, who do not represent the public as they seek greater power and wealth.

The head of New York City’s biggest police union publicly berated the mayor because the mayor publicly acknowledged the problem of racism among police. The mayor had “crossed the line,” having violated the traditional ideological unity of mayor and police. The outrage at a revelation of the “us vs. them” police ideology had nothing to do with the truth. The mayor had offered negative feedback disrupting the closed loop of authoritarian police ideology. The truth was what every Black parent knows. The mayor publicly stated that his Black son had been given the same warnings that other Black children are given by their parents about the dangers of experiencing police racism on the streets of New York City.

Social media – mostly communicating smart-phone video – has now publicly exposed racist police brutality all across America. Most Americans already knew at some level but may not have directly witnessed it. Formerly silent, many citizens now demand that police crime be prosecuted without bias, because what they knew all along is now publicly exposed and intolerable to anyone with a shred of compassion. Negative feedback has broken into the positive feedback loop.

Climate disruption Denied
Climate denial has the same ideological structure as racism; it is just applied to another population: scientists. Here again, widely distributed ideological propaganda funded by power elites wielding great wealth, such as Exxon Mobil or the Koch brothers, dominates the mass (corporate) media. Racism dehumanizes and demonizes its victims, facilitating brutal violence against them. Climate scientists are characterized as greedy research-grant seekers who produce results that some government conspiracy with unclear motives dictates. The fears of large segments of uneducated and poorly educated citizens are exploited by the power of propaganda.

The solid facts of biology demonstrate that race is a social construction having little to do with genetics and everything to do with social definitions. Statistical differences are explained by social-economic conditions. Similarly, the solid facts of climate science demonstrate that the earth is warming to dangerous levels and that the only explanation supported by facts is anthropogenic carbon emissions during the industrial age. Massive and diverse data sets are collected and analyzed by thousands of independent scientists around the world. That work leads to clear findings that have catastrophic implications for human survival. This means little to the climate deniers.

Why do climate deniers seem so irrational? They are irrational because they live in a cognitive positive feedback loop that excludes negative feedback. Their magical thinking helps them stay there, since a key element of magical thinking is a high degree of comfort with ignoring facts that conflict with one’s rigidly held belief. Climate deniers participate in a “universe of discourse” that only allows consideration of statements that provide positive feedback to support their beliefs. Their sources of information are limited to the corporate media that sustain the ideology of the fossil fuel industry. Those same sources purvey magical thinking to replace any critical thinking that might attempt to enter the loop.

Living in the Real World
The kinds of magical thinking and intellectual positive feedback loops that exclude negative evidence that characterize racism and climate denial have been around for a long time. But conditions have changed. The costs of catastrophic social and earth-systems failure loom ever larger as our complex systems break down and become increasingly unsustainable. The Internet is littered with magical thinking and all sorts of ill logic and fakery, along with just plain goofy stuff. But social media also offer a channel of communication that provides vividly real facts.

The pervasiveness of the culture of police racism is increasingly harder to deny. The growing availability of information on increasingly unprecedented weather events, and related disruptions of earth systems, makes climate denial more difficult to sustain. But the converging crises of our times grow rapidly more urgent. The race to a great transition is on. Will we make it or will it unmake us?

The Democrats have a serious problem. They have abandoned efforts to put into practice their traditional principles of supporting social and economic justice. In practical terms their election depends heavily on the largess of the rich and powerful. They are just as beholden to Wall Street and the corporate elite as are the Republicans. But as less reliable surrogates for corporate power than their Republican colleagues, they are also less well funded by the power elites. What’s a Democrat to do?

It seems clear that the Democrats will never be able to compete effectively for campaign funding in comparison with the Republicans. Generally, it is mostly the more liberal rich who will support them, and there are not enough wealthy liberals or liberal CEOs to level the electoral playing field.

Death of the Public Interest
Of course, the Republicans are in trouble too, but in different ways. They can’t seem to produce any legislation – and they consistently refuse to pass bills even based on their own ides if Obama favors them. But they have been very effective at voter suppression, gerrymandering, and pandering to their extreme right “base” from their vacuous ideological position of opposition to anything that does not further enrich their corporate and financial benefactors. The Public Interest is simply not part of the political equation.

The media narrative feigns attention to the public interest, but it plays off the hopes and fears of the general population to keep the narrative consistent with the interests of the corporate state. The media also parrots the ways the two parties frame the definitions of “issues,” as if those definitions emerged from the people rather than the financial and corporate powers that control the parties. Thus, it is not surprising to observe major misconceptions of public policy among the people.

When scientific surveys are conducted by independent researchers, not paid for by a political party, so called “public opinion” turns out to be quite different than when the corporate controlled networks or political consultants conduct them. The Affordable Care Act, widely referred to as “Obama Care,” is hated or liked depending on how the question is asked. When asked about specific provisions of the act, such as the elimination of “pre-existing conditions” as a means to exclude patients from insurance coverage, almost everyone reported favoring that provision. Yet many of the same people also reported that they oppose “Obama Care”. Similarly, I was amazed to watch “on the street” television interviews where people were asked if they liked Obama Care, to which most said no. Then the interviewer asked if they favored “The Affordable Care Act.” Most said, “oh, yes.”

Why this apparent contradiction? Well, it is clear that many people are not accurately informed about the Affordable Care Act or its politically charged shorthand designation. But it is obvious that many of them have been influenced by the racist anti-Obama propaganda that pervades talk radio and the corporate media. “Issues” are shaped by a news narrative that fits the political interests of the corporate and financial elites, not the concerns of citizens.

So, here is the Democrats’ dilemma. Democratic politicians are trapped in an ideological-financial bind. They cannot truly represent the interests of the public because that would cause the funding of their careers to be cut off. They have given up the fight for human and economic justice while retaining a hollow rhetoric of support for “jobs” and “economic growth,” “equal pay,” and sometimes even “civil rights.” They are locked into the political system of the corporatocracy. Sadly, they remain full participants in what I believe Russell Brand called “the entertainment division of the military industrial complex.” That certainly is how the corporate media portray the American political system. But it is just not that entertaining to the growing numbers who see through the thin rhetorical veil.

Reinventing Democracy for Survival
It is not working. More and more people recognize the false hope of “change we can believe in.” Whatever the accomplishments of the two Obama terms, the project for a (small-d) democratic America is in shambles. The Democratic Party façade is part of the problem and offers no solution. Despite rhetorical dance with ‘climate deniers,’ the so-called “national leadership” is going along to get along in a dying political economy that feeds them. The corporate economy continues accelerating not only planetary climate chaos, but very possibly human extinction. The scientific evidence is overwhelming and ignored.
None of this is about to change on its own. As people experiencing the growing crises of climate disruption, failing industrial food production, economic and financial disruption, and international conflicts over diminishing resources, they will begin to organize their lives in their local communities in more sustainable ways. In fact, many are already doing so. The Occupy Wall Street movement and recent Climate marches have already demonstrated the rapidly growing awareness that the changes we need are going to come from those who need them most: regular people in the communities where we live.

One of the effects of the penetration of money into every realm of life is the corruption of human values. The growing tolerance for, even blindness to, corruption in politics seems obvious. But it seems to pervade both everyday life and business as well.

Corruption is not new. Neither are bribes, theft, or betrayal. Americans used to cheerily compare our public institutions and business practices with those of ‘less developed’ nations considered endemically corrupt in their imputed ‘backwardness.’ When parking on the street anywhere in Mexico, U.S. tourists begrudgingly paid a small fee to a semi-uniformed “policeman” to guard their car. This “protection money” assured them that their car would be there, intact, on their return from shopping. In many “underdeveloped” countries, such services are typically offered by the otherwise unemployed. Americans look down on such activities as reflecting a corruption of the public function, nevertheless are grateful for the service. In the U.S., we prided ourselves for being ‘above’ such petty corruption. In our naiveté, we expected our public servants to perform their functions for a salary and never take bribes. Yet we quietly acknowledge much bigger backroom deals.

The disintegration of naturally formed communities in industrial society has been largely completed. Now we have “gated communities” where nobody knows their neighbor, and “sacrifice zones” where public agencies have abandoned the population. Individuals face a complex world of economic dependence on large institutions. They look forward to a fate based solely on their ability to navigate an economy uncommitted to anyone. With little or no social support, we each confront faceless institutions at work and in public. Sociologists have talked for decades about the ‘atomization’ of social relations.

Market Madness
Society is fragmented into a collection of individuals, each of whom has little if any relationships of commitment over time. We are urged to be committed solely to ourselves as “economic actors” seeking the best advantage in any situation. After all, that is the model of human behavior that has been promoted throughout the industrial era. These conditions of personal life, of course, make people most vulnerable to the power of the elites that control employment along with the rest of the economy. It’s a perfect environment for self-dealing.

Before money became the measure of everything, social norms and values were important – yet non-economic – factors that affected the decisions individuals made. People were morally bound to manage their behavior in certain ways that often served a public interest in sustained community cohesion. Sure, crimes were committed, people cheated, etc. But non-monetary norms of human conduct prevailed in most communities.

The elevation of markets as the paragon of progress imposed heavy costs on human morality and compassion. The virtues of normative communities are not cultivated by markets; the only “market virtue” is the goal of selfish gain. That breaks down bonds of affiliation and caring.

Monetizing Humanity
The assumed good resulting from the “invisible hand” that Adam imagined, does not exist in the fossil-fuel driven industrial era. Giant banks and corporations control both markets and government. Human values are sent to the back of the bus and are simultaneously declared attained. Adam Smith proffered the “invisible hand” as a metaphor to reflect the interaction of merchants and tradesmen in a local community. They bargained and produced goods and services on equal footings. They were also cognizant of community needs, standards, and judgment of their practices. Business conducted in real time in real communities occurred under conditions quite different than in today’s corporate state.

The crowning achievement of the industrial era is the monetization of everything and everyone. You are only as human as the purchasing power your employment or business dealings can demonstrate. That is the social measure of the person. But as Michael Sandel has so clearly shown in his book, What Money Can’t buy,* a full range of the most important of human dimensions from civic virtue to interpersonal honor to community solidarity, cannot be monetized except by the corruption their very essence.

This corruption of human values, of course, is a windfall for the financial, military, and industrial power elites running the corporate state. Community fragmentation and personal selfishness allow them to more easily manipulate populations by mass media indoctrination and massive distortions of the meaning and practice of justice.

Yet, the power of people recognizing the destruction of human values, cannot be overcome by advertising or the phony patriotism of war hysteria. Attention can be diverted temporarily, but people are waking up – as Occupy and the Climate March have powerfully demonstrated – especially as the elites charge headlong like lemmings as if their actions had no bearing on the destruction we all experience more and more.
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* Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

I watched the entire dash-cam video over and over again. The South Carolina State Trooper shot a young black man when he reached for his drivers license as directed. Many major news outlets played it. Maybe that is because it wasn’t a gruesome bloody scene and the victim fell beyond the dash-cam range upon being shot. Yet it was certainly dramatic. But the audio helped me get a sense of the flow of the aftermath. It was an unusual video in that the viewer could clearly see the sequence of events in relation to hearing what was said. That did not make it any less incomprehensible, without placing it in the larger social context. Watch it and you will see what I mean.

Clearly, the victim believed himself to be following the orders of the officer. After patting his back pocket, he reached into his car for the license. Clearly the officer appeared to be reacting to what he defined as a threat, firing his weapon four times. But from the viewpoint of the camera, no threat was apparent. It is only when we explore the definitions of the situation at play that we can make sense of what happened.

Interpreting Police Violence

All inferences of racism aside – I have no way of knowing the extent that the white trooper may have harbored racist images of young black males – the officer’s actions spoke volumes about his expectations. So did his words. The apologetic victim kept asking why he had been shot as he lay on the asphalt off camera. Obviously, the officer defined the young man’s action of reaching into the car as an existential threat, which drove him to draw and fire four times. The officer tried to explain that “you dove head-first back into the car” causing him to shoot. A word of advice: if you are ever stopped by the police, whoever you are, wherever you are, never make any quick movement.

To be brief, even in the disturbing implications of this video, it illustrates several important factors at play in police-citizen interactions. Until these factors are understood, little progress will be made in police-civilian relations in Ferguson, L.A., Albuquerque, Chicago, New York, or anywhere else in America.

First, most police officers are poorly trained. Second, it is a dangerous job. While many police officers get through their entire career without firing a shot at another human being, those who do fire their weapons are trained to shoot to kill. But even those who are a good shot at the range miss the majority of their shots in the heat of the moment. Yet, on the street an officer never knows whether a sudden move or a quick turn might involve a weapon. So, the NRA wants to arm everyone!

Third, most civilians fear the police (even when they respect them) because we all know they have the physical and institutional power to kill us. We are aware that in most bad shootings the officer escapes any serious consequences, while the consequences for us can be fatal.

Fourth, we all expect the police “to protect and to serve,” but we pay little or no attention to the fact that they are poorly trained, most are hardly educated, and many are self-selected into law enforcement because they like to beat on people. In the academies, such as they are, an attitude of rigid authoritarianism is encouraged. Now we have added to the macho ethos the new image of the “Warrior Cop” and all the military weapons and hardware that encourage the attitudes that lead to perceiving all civilians as ‘the enemy.’

Police in Civil Society

As I have argued in some previous posts, a truly civilian police force composed of actual Peace Officers, can only happen if our communities force the standards to be raised to the highest levels and the officers to be paid very well if they meet those standards. If they do not, they should be removed from the force after a two or three year probation period. A college degree in the appropriate field, such as sociology, psychology, or criminal justice, should be required. Extensive training to at least first-degree black belt in a martial art is a must. Aikido, for example, was developed to subdue an assailant, not to injure or kill him. How many people have been shot when a properly trained officer could have easily subdued them? Far too many. An apprenticeship with ‘master cops’ with proven expertise and attitude of service should be instituted. Only with the development of a strong culture of service can the culture of violence be diverted.

But none of these standards will mean much at all if a police department is not led by highly dedicated public servants who view the police as committed to serving the people. That is not currently the case in most police departments today. It may seem odd to compare the crisis of policing in America to the climate crisis or to the economic crisis. But each is a fundamental predicament ignored by the political and economic elites that make the key decisions in this nation and benefit from the status quo. In all three cases, the change we should believe in will never happen unless the people make it happen. Occupy Wall Street and the fossil-fuel divestment movements have begun to demonstrate that it can be done, as have other historical movements. The entrenched interests in each of these sectors can be overcome by the power of numbers.